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Wednesday, January 28, 2015

Snowstorm shutters 20% of Citi Bike system

When the temp is only 20 degrees, this may be more of an interesting milestone than a transportation crisis but…

This morning, 69 Citi Bike stations are out of service -- more than 20 percent of the system. On top of that, at 8:30 am, 52 stations were empty and one was full. That renders more than a third of the system unusable, by far the highest number we’ve ever seen.

This may indicate a more managed response to snow than last year when Citi Bike admitted it left far too many bikes in the stations in January. A record 5433 bikes were available on Jan 17, 2014. The bikes subsequently got plowed under and many suffered damaged as a result.

Whatever the case, there are fewer Citi Bikes available this morning -- 1400 at 8:30 am -- than at any time since we’ve been tracking system performance at the beginning of 2014. There were 2900+ bikes available before the storm hit.

Citi Bike has pledged to get the fleet back to pre-storm levels over the next couple of days.

9:30 am update: Citi Bike, in a Facebook post, says the storm knocked 30 stations offline. That doesn’t explain what happened to the other 39 it reported to be out of service at 8:30 am. Could be that those stations are operational but plowed-in.

Good luck getting a bike in Brooklyn this morning. Gray stations are those out of service.